Bumping this as I think it should be top priority to change the issuance rate to lower the inflation of ZEC.
It does not matter how great a technology is if there is no adoption.
We got to be realistic that we are in the crypto industry and price is a driver of adoption.
I see a downstream effect if we basically go into halving sooner than later.
Price goes up → adoption increases → there is more money for innovation.
I still don’t understand why we are not talking more about this @zooko
@Dodger can we have a broader discussion on how we can push this forward with other ECC members.
Is it feasible? How soon? What are the drawbacks if any?
We are at a critical junction for the project and should think of adoption as priority #1 which goes hand in hand with the ECCs north star goal.
Steven mentioned on the ECC Twitterspace today that PoS will have an equal to or lower issuance than PoW, but that ECC isn’t anticipating any issuance changes on the PoW side before the transition.
Issuance in PoS systems and how it relates to Zcash, as stated in the last blog, is the next major topic.
Applause!
I need a way to give a few dozen 
s to this post. It succinctly says what I wanted to at greater length—plus some things I have drafted for other threads.
If more Zcashers thought this way, then in the long term, ZEC would start to perform more like BTC.
I myself think that Zcash made a mistake by too-closely copying Bitcoin’s emissions model. I never complained about it, because what’s done is done; and drastic changes to economics make a coin untrustworthy. A currency needs confidence—above all, a currency needs confidence!
Now, I want to be stocking up on precious, precious ZECs that I could not otherwise have afforded. Buy ZEC like this is BTC in 2015. But, no: This POS thing is in the air, and there are other proposals flying around for drastic changes to economics. Not even relatively minor changes like a tail emission (which I would also debate), but financial manipulation based on short-term thinking.
Why would I buy more ZEC? Better buy BTC. BTC is trustworthy. When I buy BTC, I have absolute confidence that it will not change its value fundamentals. What I buy is what I get.
BTC is now on deep discount sale, just like ZEC. Which shoud I buy?
Like Bitcoin’s current drawdown? Everything is now down. That is the nature of a “prolonged bear market”.
Here is how Bitcoiners deal with this type of talk:
ZEC is currently between its first and second halvings. To me, buying ZEC now feels like buying BTC in 2014–2015 —except that now, ZEC is talking about wrecking itself with a switch to POS.
In August–September 2015, Bitcoin seemed pretty dead. It went as low as $215, after a previous ATH of $1,236. The Bitcoin Forum’s speculation threads were dead; everyone who was too worried about the price gave up and ran away. They ran away from BTC at $215–250. Does that sound smart to you now? The smart people were buying BTC at those prices—taking coins out of the hands of everyone who ran away.
What has POW to do with it? I am currently holding some amount of a POS coin with a market cap comparable to ZEC, which had a 2021 high higher than ZEC, which had a June 2022 low lower than ZEC. Wheee: When the whales started seriously dumping it before, my money was locked up in stake where it dropped 20% during the unbonding period for a chunk that I decided to dump before it crashed. Thus, there is a word for me: Bagholder.
All POS coins are only manipulation to trick you into locking up money so you won’t dump when you should. POS altogether is a Ponzi-style scheme that gives you more of the same coin, to bribe you to accept being forbidden from dumping what you already have. Staking lockup is ipso facto a sign that something should be dumped. The clean, honest economics of a coin with no lockups show that a coin is willing to stand on its merits, whatever they may be.
Observe Bitcoin. 100% of the BTC supply is freely-floating. If you are worried about price, do you want ZEC to be more like BTC?
(This is only a scattershot list of a few of my arguments against POS. I need to start presenting them in a more organized way.)
I dont know how old you posters are but I had a career in tech.
You can think you are buying the best piece of tech ever but with no adoption it will die.
In all major insititutions SAP is the prevalent software used. Do you know how bad it is? How you basically need a PHD on SAP to configure it out. How the gui looks like a 5 year old child put it together?
Yet it is the software of choice for all fortune 500 companies? Why ? Adoption.
Yeah there are other softwares I have seen that are 100x better. Yet no one buys. Why? Brand recognition. SAP has the brand and the first mover advantage.
All those other softwares are dead. They are better. Easier to use. But those companies died.
That is what zec is in danger of becoming.
Yet you selfishily want to stay here in the 50s for you to accumulate? Then talk about other people who talk about price? That is rich.
I want it to go higher for the project to survive and thrive.
You want it to stay here because for whatever reason you didnt accumulate in the 70s and 80s at the beginning of the bull run 2 years ago?
Man this community is insane with people who have 0 experience in how tech works and is adopted.
Your childish ad hominem betrays you—as does the failure to use an apostrophe in a contraction; that is typical of Millennials. And you are obviously new to “crypto”, given your reaction to the bear market. No one who has been through bear markets before talks this way.
My age is none of your business; but I’ve been doing cypherpunk stuff for long enough that “crypto” means PGP to me, “export ciphers” still give me traumatic nightmares, and I understand that Satoshi invented decentralized cryptocurrency because centralized DigiCash failed. Zooko was involved in DigiCash; when I first heard that Zooko was involved in the thing that descended from the thing iterated from Zerocoin, it gave the project some extra cred in my eyes. Otherwise, I would have been more skeptical of an altcoin sprung from a line of technology that was originally conceived for Bitcoin.
That is a wildly incorrect description of how the tech industry works.
SAP sells primarily in big B2B deals. Enterprise. Not COTS. Pop quiz for those who wish to teach about the tech industry here: What is the difference between the COTS market, and the enterprise market?
SAP has sales teams who meet with executives. They assuredly do not waste money attempting to astroturf Twitter and Youtube memes to moon-chasing retail “investors” who imagine they’ll become overnight millionaires from a $10k $500 gamble they call an “investment”. Most consumers have never even heard of SAP.
SAP also has actual products. Debating the merits of SAP is off-topic here; suffice it to say that I dispute your whole characterization of their business.
By astonishing coincidence, I have been working for some days on an essay that works up to the conclusion that Zcash needs to forget its failed attempts to sell to retail, and shift focus—including a new focus on B2B (as well as reaching retail via B2C). I expect for my essay to be understood by anyone who knows how SAP actually does business.
Despite spending, and despite some unfortunate losses, I still have a bit of the ZEC that I nabbed in the $25–30 range around late 2018/early 2019 (and in the $35–40 range in early 2017); so… No, I do not generally wish to buy at the beginning of a bull run. I prefer to buy in a bear market. Such as now. Unless the project is about to destroy itself with drastic, ill-considered fundamental changes to its economics.
This statement is true, albeit lamentably misdirected.
Interesting and thanks for noting that point from the call.
By the time a transition to PoS occurs there will be 19 million of the 21 million total distributed, what would be the point with trying to tinker around the code to distribute the last 2 million coins? Understanding that nothing will be considered (or done) about this topic until that late into the coin distribution plot, my new theory is that they’re going to build an assertion around expanding the total cap higher than 21 million, possibly going to a Monero style of permanent coin supply inflation.
I think the point of not altering the inflation rate is in fact the opposite idea to Monero - we need to maintain a consistent, predictable tokenomics/distribution pattern. Disrupting that or changing it arbitrarily to support the price of the coin sends a confusing signal about centralization and marks a major disruption to the narrative about Zcash as money. We all want Zcash to succeed as an investment, but treating the coin like a share of common stock subject to insider manipulation runs deeply counter to the idea of Zcash being a democratic store of value/means of exchange that is not subject to the whims of a centralized control or driven by short-term profit at the expense of future value.
I’m far from a Bitcoin Maxi, but Bitcoin has a lot going for it. We should take what works from Bitcoin and focus on the areas that we can improve on. Namely privacy, scaling, and continued development.
Agree with @nullius here in that at this point (and perhaps ever), a major change to the underlying economics of Zcash would be extremely ill advised. The one caveat to that being the importance of thinking through the end-state of coin distribution, and the implications for incentives to maintain the network once the inflation rate becomes negligible.
Zcash is patently not a store of value (every ZEC today is heavily diluted by new ZEC tomorrow that in aggregate make all ZEC worth less in the future. This nearly physical outcome will not change until a significant, persistent demand side rebalance happens… or if the dilution rate is decreased, in affect bringing down the supply to balance current demand).
It seems you’re talking around the point about decentralization/ democracy that supports either cohort in this debate.
If there is a broad community agreement -which can only be determined, if the points of debate are engaged with by a vast majority of the community- that the protocol should be enhanced regarding coin minting and distribution, then that is the direction that development should move. And if there is not agreement, then we expect to keep doing the same old same old (enhance nothing re: coin distribution)
Would you call Bitcoin in 2014–2015 “patently not a store of value”? As I remarked above, ZEC is now on its supply curve where BTC was at that time. By your supply-side argument, buying BTC at around $215–$400 and holding it till today would be “patently not a store of value”.
I don’t know about you, but I wish that I could go back in time and store every scrap of available value in BTC at around $215–$400.
If I want to succeed, I strive to learn from success.
ZEC has lost >97% of its value against BTC since mid-2017. That is to say: If you had spent 1.0 BTC to buy ZEC when ZEC was at its ATH against BTC, and you now used the ZEC to buy BTC, you would end up with less than 0.03 BTC.
So, the answer is to make ZEC economically less like BTC? I do not get that type of thinking. ZEC clearly needs to be economically more like BTC!
Better idea: Notice that BTC was a great buy at the time when it was at ZEC’s present point on its supply curve. Have some patience with the supply-side issuance schedule to which, for better or for worse, ZEC committed itself in 2016. And work on the demand side.
The only realistic way for Zcash to beat Bitcoin in scaling is perhaps with recursive zero-knowledge proofs. I hope that that is feasible.
Bitcoin far exceeds Zcash for continued development, on all points except for blockchain privacy. Bitcoin is even ahead of Zcash in network-layer privacy. Zcash needs to catch up to Bitcoin. I know that there is a meme going around that Bitcoin development is moribund; it’s pretty much entirely the opposite of the truth.
The primary reason why people trust BTC is its safety and stability. You can buy BTC, put it into cold storage, go into a coma, wake up years later, and still have your BTC—the thing you bought, with the characteristics you bought, with no nasty surprises. The technology evolves, but the monetary policy is predictable and dependable: You can have confidence in that.
I hope that Zcash has not already irreparably damaged confidence in the long-term economic stability of ZEC. I want for ZEC to be as trustworthy as BTC.
So, you see what I see here.
In addition to the problems that you state, treating the coin like a share of common stock is also an invitation for the SEC to decide that Zcash’s U.S.-based entities and persons are marketing an illegal unregistered security. (I believe that that’s also a problem with POS.)
This is pointless and baseless non-logical hypothetical scenario building and so I won’t spend much time here. Zcash today is 10,000% un-like 2014 Bitcoin, regarding essentially all social, technological, macro-market, and crypto-market traits.
Why not take a bigger bite next time and say that Zcash today is like being the owner of the patent for the world’s first cardboard box?
Context re-added by me to the internal quote; boldface is in the original, highlighting is added:
Please don’t shift the goalposts, then call my argument “pointless and baseless non-logical” anything.
You propounded a purely supply-side economic argument. I rebutted it with a counterexample: Whether or not Zcash’s supply curve is optimal (I never thought it was!), it is definitely not fatal as you proclaimed.
For a visual, I recently happened across this chart; the source is cited below:
I am all too painfully aware that Zcash is not sufficiently like Bitcoin. I said so further on in the same post; and many of my other recent posts make it obvious, I want to make Zcash a Bitcoinier thing! Given that BTC has outperformed ZEC by about 35x in the past five years, my wish is obviously benevolent and beneficial to Zcash. (For comparison, BTC has outperformed ETH by about 2x–3x in the same time period.)
None of this is hypothetical or navel-gazing theory to me. I have suffered financial losses from holding ZEC. Worse: I have suffered losses of precious, precious BTC from holding ZEC. 
Let’s please make this thing at least a little bit more like Bitcoin—not less like it!
Now, for a different type of visual, perpend this graphic which purports to illustrate “Key moments in the short and volatile life of bitcoin.”
It is from this article; note the date:
Bitcoiners laugh at this stuff.
Now, compare the 28 October 2016 Coindesk article from which the above-depicted BTC and ZEC supply curve comparison is taken. It speaks breathlessly about, “Parity with bitcoin?” Bitcoiners also laugh at that.
Instead of simply observing that, in your words, “Zcash today is 10,000% un-like 2014 Bitcoin, regarding essentially all social, technological, macro-market, and crypto-market traits”—a fact which I know all too well!—I think it’s much more productive to examine why, and how that situation could be improved.
I should like to explore that sometime in detail, from my vantage point as a Bitcoiner-Zcasher. Here and now, I will simply note that on this forum, and here in this thread, I am a Zcasher behaving like a Bitcoiner. Laughing off worries about a bear market, with admonitions to buy the dip. Intransigently opposing any change to economics and monetary policy. Expressing a general disdain for the whole concept of “governance”. Preaching decentralization—real decentralization, not buzzword hype “decentralization”. I am trying here to apply what makes Bitcoin beat everything else in the market.
I know what makes Bitcoin successful—and I know that Zcash is “10,000% un-like [Bitcoin]”. So—let’s make it more like Bitcoin, but with strong privacy!
P.S., food for thought on a subject I’ve been intending more to address:
In 2014, Bitcoin was still being roiled with controversy from the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation”; and the worst of its 2015 bear market was largely precipitated by a war between the so-called “Bitcoin Foundation”, and the Bitcoin Core developers.
It started as a Bitcoin civil war, at a time when “Bitcoin Foundation” leadership consisted of some leading Core developers—they tried to consolidate their status into central authority that others rejected. The roots of that conflict go back to around the time when Satoshi disappeared—and it precipitated further conflicts, which were not fully resolved until 2018. Bitcoin was almost destroyed by a centralized foundation!
(Note also: Bitcoin Core development is decentralized, unlike Zcash development. And Bitcoin development funding is decentralized and 100% voluntary.)
Did you notice: A persistent theme of my posts is to advocate that the Zcash Foundation’s strategy should be to bootstrap the community until the Zcash Foundation is obsolete.
We only have the luxury of knowing that 2014-2015 Bitcoin is a store of value in hindsight.
Zcash, given its notably unsecure future as a relevant altcoin, has a few sigmas more risk to finding itself in the history books rather than on the menu for 2022-2023 hedge fund managers looking to buy dips.
Your points are non-logical because you set up an assertion based on Bitcoin’s known outcome then apply it to the unknown Zcash of the year 2024 or beyond
My supply curve assertion is based on the evidence that we have. 5-6 years of heavy supply side dilution which has outperformed the demand side. The poor relative price performance correlates to the ongoing phase of ZEC hyperinflation, you’re free to debate that this is not causal… but again we only know the answer when the years 2024-2025 are now
That Zooko cited chart is not particularly helpful, it badly underestimated ZEC inflation. We will reach 15,000,000 coins circulating before Thanksgiving this year. I’m sure that if you send Messari a nice email, they’ll create an updated supply curve chart with data based up through 2022 (their most recent analysis is dated to 2020)
Please study how the emission schedule works. That chart was not some handwavy “estimate” as you imply. For it to be wildly wrong, Zcash’s POW targeting algorithm would need to fail pretty badly.
I just crunched some numbers. For reference:
Block timestamps are not absolutely accurate, but the are sufficiently accurate for this type of long-range analysis.
From Genesis to Blossom, the overal actual blocktime average was 150.642 seconds. That is about 0.4% faster than expected. Therefore, from 28 October 2016 to 11 December 2019, ZEC inflation was 0.4% faster than projected on the chart.
From Blossom to Orchard, the overal actual blocktime average was 75.3924 seconds. That is about 0.5% faster than expected. Therefore, from 11 December 2019 to 31 May 2022, ZEC inflation was 0.5% faster than projected on the chart.
I don’t need to send Messari a nice e-mail. I can do the analysis myself—including a block-by-block supply audit, if I so desire. I could even make charts—if anyone would pay me for the trouble. It will be better when I have my own node up and running again; I am embarrassed to admit, I am still having some logistical difficulties getting new hardware set up to handle the fast-growing blockchain.
Now, please explain: Where do you get the idea that “We will reach 15,000,000 coins circulating before Thanksgiving this year”? It is totally wrong.
I presume that you mean American Thanksgiving, which will occur on 2022-11-24; I will take “before Thanksgiving” to mean 2022-11-24T00:00:00Z as a cutoff time. According to Blockchair’s API, as of block height 1750359 at 2022-07-25T22:42:27Z, there are 12,688,345.53626820 ZEC in circulation. I don’t know how they reach this number, but I will presume it is more or less correct unless otherwise evidenced (or until I get my node up and running so I can query its RPC). Edited to add: If you carefully examine the chart in my prior post, it looks consistent with having about 12.7 million ZEC by around mid-2022; that chart from 2016 was just about right on target! </edit>
To get from there to 15,000,000 ZEC by midnight on 24 November 2022, we would need to issue >16.576 ZEC per 75-second average blocktime instead of the current 3.125 ZEC per block. Either that, or drastically speed up the blocks!
What is the basis of your fear that millions of extra ZEC will suddenly materialize out of nowhere?
Note: Considered individually, a block does not take “about 75 seconds”. Confusion about the usefulness of the average of an exponential distribution is a pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people say that “a Bitcoin block takes about 10 minutes”, and I would not wish to push the same fallacy here. However, the long-term average blocktime for post-Blossom Zcash should converge on about 75 seconds; and this analysis is a proper use of the average blocktime.
Edited—addendum: Zcash’s issuance schedule was copied almost by rote from Bitcoin; and all major changes were compensated for in the opposite direction (faster blocks, proportionately lower block reward per block). To understand Zcash’s supply-side economics, it is therefore instructive to study Bitcoin’s supply-side economics:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply
The only substantive supply-side difference is who gets the supply. All new BTC is issued to miners, who must divest themselves of their coins at market to pay their electricity bills, amortized equipment costs, and other overhead; for a miner to hold newly-issued BTC is only a roundabout way to buy BTC (a topic often discussed from the miner’s perspective in mining forums). 10% of the total maximum ZEC supply was allocated to the Founder’s Reward, and distributed on schedule between Genesis and the first halving. Thereafter, a major policy change allocated even more new issuance to the “dev fee”.
All other economic differences between the two coins are purely on the demand-side. ZEC has much lower demand than BTC did at the same point on its supply curve; accordingly, the price is lower. A perception of economic instability and untrustworthiness of monetary policy reduces demand—especially from sophisticated investors who trust BTC.
Thus, I repeat what I said on this thread 2022-07-20:
@daira have you got some time to weigh in here?
Based on the CoinMarket cap page (which has historically shown the correct circulating supply) we are at roughly 14,800,000 or more. Thats why I suggest we hit 15 million before Thanksgiving
I didn’t want to reveal publicly where my node is stuck. Besides the embarrassment, it is a network privacy issue: I may be the only node in the world now stuck at this height. But for the greater good… sigh.
As of block height 1715985, block timestamp 2022-06-25 22:50:44 (), the getblockchaininfo and gettxoutsetinfo RPCs tell me the following about Zcash’s supply:
| Value Pool | ZEC |
|---|---|
| Transparent | 11,751,562.60778898 |
| Orchard | 9,523.68925908 |
| Sapling | 802,836.08938170 |
| Sprout | 28,165.27842336 |
| Total | 12,592,087.66485312 |
@noamchom, what does your node tell you? If you’ve got a twitter or something, please ask @cz_binance why his CMC site is FUDding the Zcash supply.
Click to expand:
nullius@zcash:~$ zcash-cli getblockchaininfo
{
"chain": "main",
"blocks": 1715985,
"initial_block_download_complete": false,
"headers": 1715985,
"bestblockhash": "000000000198bdd5446ff5a0ca08b59940b9c68e24a831c0e3594c39071f8f98",
"difficulty": 73467160.93973005,
"verificationprogress": 0.9788401600916485,
"chainwork": "000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000099c14b2e928d79f",
"pruned": false,
"size_on_disk": 39112797667,
"estimatedheight": 1750720,
"commitments": 1545080,
"valuePools": [
{
"id": "sprout",
"monitored": true,
"chainValue": 28165.27842336,
"chainValueZat": 2816527842336
},
{
"id": "sapling",
"monitored": true,
"chainValue": 802836.08938170,
"chainValueZat": 80283608938170
},
{
"id": "orchard",
"monitored": true,
"chainValue": 9523.68925908,
"chainValueZat": 952368925908
}
],
"softforks": [
{
"id": "bip34",
"version": 2,
"enforce": {
"status": true,
"found": 4000,
"required": 750,
"window": 4000
},
"reject": {
"status": true,
"found": 4000,
"required": 950,
"window": 4000
}
},
{
"id": "bip66",
"version": 3,
"enforce": {
"status": true,
"found": 4000,
"required": 750,
"window": 4000
},
"reject": {
"status": true,
"found": 4000,
"required": 950,
"window": 4000
}
},
{
"id": "bip65",
"version": 4,
"enforce": {
"status": true,
"found": 4000,
"required": 750,
"window": 4000
},
"reject": {
"status": true,
"found": 4000,
"required": 950,
"window": 4000
}
}
],
"upgrades": {
"5ba81b19": {
"name": "Overwinter",
"activationheight": 347500,
"status": "active",
"info": "See https://z.cash/upgrade/overwinter/ for details."
},
"76b809bb": {
"name": "Sapling",
"activationheight": 419200,
"status": "active",
"info": "See https://z.cash/upgrade/sapling/ for details."
},
"2bb40e60": {
"name": "Blossom",
"activationheight": 653600,
"status": "active",
"info": "See https://z.cash/upgrade/blossom/ for details."
},
"f5b9230b": {
"name": "Heartwood",
"activationheight": 903000,
"status": "active",
"info": "See https://z.cash/upgrade/heartwood/ for details."
},
"e9ff75a6": {
"name": "Canopy",
"activationheight": 1046400,
"status": "active",
"info": "See https://z.cash/upgrade/canopy/ for details."
},
"c2d6d0b4": {
"name": "NU5",
"activationheight": 1687104,
"status": "active",
"info": "See https://z.cash/upgrade/nu5/ for details."
}
},
"consensus": {
"chaintip": "c2d6d0b4",
"nextblock": "c2d6d0b4"
}
}
nullius@zcash:~$ zcash-cli gettxoutsetinfo
{
"height": 1715985,
"bestblock": "000000000198bdd5446ff5a0ca08b59940b9c68e24a831c0e3594c39071f8f98",
"transactions": 1804723,
"txouts": 21261303,
"bytes_serialized": 588650026,
"hash_serialized": "f65b708a9eb1818486130b1bc313030a2e819e3827a481e9126d1705fbd66334",
"total_amount": 11751562.60778898
}
nullius@zcash:~$ bc -sql
11751562.60778898 + 9523.68925908 + 802836.08938170 + 28165.27842336
12592087.66485312
If you have a healthy node running at the current chain tip, I don’t believe there is any privacy problem with sharing your results here.
/* XXX TODO */ When I am up and running again, adapt some tricks I know for auditing the Bitcoin supply to accounting for each and every zat here.
Coinmarketcap has the total ZEC count wrong and it’s been wrong for a long time. They likely don’t account for Blossom.
LOL, a rough back-of-the-envelope guesstimate shows that that could be the exact cause: Estimating what they think the supply should be as of the current block height, without adjusting for Blossom—and without checking the blockchain to see what the supply actually is!
Let this be a lesson: DO NOT trust centralized information sites. Use the blockchain! It is trustless and decentralized. Run your own full node, and query your own full node. See my prior post on this thread for the exact RPCs you need to check on the current supply, with a working example.
(Note: To help reduce your reliance on centralized block explorer sites, -txindex is your friend. It won’t give you all of the indexing needed for the functionality of a block explorer site, but it will at least give you a txindex. If you want a local block explorer, you can use open-source software to install your own block explorer locally, too. This is an issue not only of trustlessness, but also, of privacy.)
There is an awful lot of buggy code out there on these centralized information sites. If Coin Marketcap is doing what it looks like they’re doing, then this is exactly backwards:
Please don’t bother Daira about this: Ask @cz_binance. (But note that if Coin Marketcap has the supply wrong, then it is probably proportionately overestimating the ZEC market cap. I guess. Probably.)
Hey, since the spam issues effecting zcash wallets, have you been able to identify whether Ycash is getting growth in unique addresses? Is there a site for ycash metrics?